Leiden conventions rendered as EpiDoc: restorations as supplied(reason=lost), gaps as gap, abbreviations as expan(abbr+ex), omitted letters as supplied(reason=omitted), surplus as surplus, corrections as corr. Critical apparatus as listApp. The facing translation is div type=translation; the historical commentary is div type=commentary.
In the consulship of M. Iunius Silanus and Q. Sulpicius Camerinus, on the Ides of March, at Baiae, in the praetorium, the following edict of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was posted up: Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, pontifex maximus, in the sixth year of tribunician power, eleven times acclaimed imperator, father of the fatherland, consul designate for the fourth time, declares:
Since, in the matter of old disputes long left pending — pending even in the time of my uncle Tiberius Caesar, who had sent Pinarius Apollinaris to settle them, disputes which (so far as I recall) lay only between the people of Comum and the Bergalei: and since he, first through my uncle's persistent absence and then under the principate of Gaius, neglected to report back — not foolishly, since nothing was being required of him — and since afterwards Camurius Statutus reported to me that most of the fields and the woodland pastures belong to my jurisdiction: I have sent to the spot Iulius Planta, my friend and companion. He, having called in my procurators — both those from another district and those in the neighbourhood — has investigated the matter with the greatest care and reached his findings; and as for the rest, just as it has been set out for me in the report he himself drew up, I permit him to determine and to pronounce.
As for the status of the Anauni, the Tulliasses and the Sinduni — of whom the informer is said to have shown that one part was attributed to the people of Tridentum and another part not even attributed at all: although I observe that this class of men does not have a very secure basis for its Roman citizenship, nevertheless, since they are said to have been in possession of it by long usurpation, and to be so intermingled with the Tridentines that they could not be separated from them without grave injury to that distinguished municipium — I permit them, by my benefaction, to remain in the legal condition in which they believed themselves to stand; and the more willingly because many men of that class are said even to be serving in my praetorian guard, some indeed to have commanded as centurions, and a few, enrolled in the jury-panels at Rome, to be judging cases.
And this benefaction I grant to them on these terms: that whatever they have transacted and done as though Roman citizens — whether among themselves, or with the Tridentines, or with others — I order to be valid; and the names which they previously bore as though Roman citizens, I permit them to keep.
The bronze opens with a precise protocol: the consular year (AD 46), the day (15 March), and the place — Baiae, in the praetorium, the seaside villa where Claudius was staying. An edictum is a proclamation made on the issuer's own authority; this one was propositum, ‘posted up’, for all to read.
Then the emperor's full style — pontifex maximus, trib. pot. VI, imp. XI, p. p., cos. design. IIII — and the verb that defines the genre: dicit, ‘he declares’. Where a senatus consultum speaks in the third person of a deliberating body, the edict speaks in the first person of one man (Crawford, in Girard & Senn, Les lois des Romains, no. 4).
The first matter is an old boundary dispute in the Alpine foothills, unresolved for decades — through the reign of Tiberius (Claudius's patruus, uncle) and of Gaius. The edict is unusually candid about the delay, and even exonerates the long-dead commissioner Pinarius Apollinaris: he did not report back, but ‘not foolishly, since nothing was being required of him’.
Claudius's solution is administrative. He sends Iulius Planta — his amicus et comes, a member of the imperial entourage — to the spot, to work with the procurators and draw up a commentarium, a written report, on the strength of which the emperor delegates the decision back to him. The clause is a small, exact picture of how the Principate actually governed: by personal envoys, written findings, and delegated jurisdiction.
The heart of the edict. Three Alpine peoples — the Anauni, the Tulliasses and the Sinduni — had been living, and acting in law, as Roman citizens; an informer had now revealed that their title to citizenship was defective. Claudius admits the defect openly — ‘this class of men does not have a very secure basis for its Roman citizenship’ — and then sets it aside (Crawford, in Girard & Senn, no. 4).
His reasons are pragmatic, and revealing. The peoples have held the status by longa usurpatio — long unchallenged use; they are inseparably intermingled with the loyal municipium of Tridentum; and — the decisive point — men of these communities already serve in the emperor's own praetorian guard, command as centurions, and sit on the Roman jury-panels. To un-make their citizenship would be to un-make Roman soldiers and Roman jurors. Claudius therefore confirms the status as a beneficium, an act of imperial grace.
The closing clause makes the grant work backward as well as forward. Everything the three peoples had already done tanquam ciues Romani — ‘as though Roman citizens’ — their contracts, marriages, transactions, with each other and with outsiders — Claudius orders rata, valid; and the Roman nomina they had assumed, they may keep.
The phrase tanquam ciues Romani, repeated, is the edict's quiet masterstroke: it concedes that the citizenship was never properly theirs, and in the same breath makes its consequences permanent. The retroactive validation is the same device the Lex de imperio Vespasiani would later use for the acts of an emperor — here applied, by an emperor's grace, to three small peoples of the Alps.